News analysis

Syria's artists

Fateful journeys

ORWA NYRABIA, a Syrian film producer, must have known that Damascus airport was a more dangerous way to leave the country than via the roads to Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey. Fellow filmmaker Faris Fayyad was picked up at the very same airport last November and tortured by state security services for four months. Once released, he left Syria by foot. Yet, on August 23rd Mr Nyrabia made his way to the capital’s airport and checked in for a flight to Cairo, where he had been invited by a group of Egyptian filmmakers and citizen journalists. He did not board the plane and has not been heard of since.

Syria’s Ministry of Culture is supposedly still a patron of “Dox Box”, a documentary film festival set up in 2008 by Mr Nyrabia and his wife, Diana El-Jeiroudi, which is the biggest such event in the Arab world. But the crackdown on freedom of expression over the past 18 months has been fierce—last summer a gang of pro-government thugs kidnapped Ali Farzat, a well-known Syrian cartoonist, and crushed both of his hands “so that he cannot draw Assad anymore”. Since this year’s Dox Box festival could not be held in Syria, a “Dox Box Global Day” was staged instead in 38 cities around the world on March 15th, the anniversary of the start of the uprising.

The European Documentary Network presented its annual award to the Dox Box team the following day, praising those involved as "a group of courageous people with a great vision and outstanding will-power". Given all this, it may not be surprising that Mr Nyrabia had become a target for the Syrian regime’s culture commissars.

Mr Nyrabia, a big, bear-like, ironic man with a dry sense of humour knows what he wants, but he knows how to listen too. So was it that those who might have warned against going to the airport were not there to stop him?

Ossama Mohammed, a filmmaker and Mr Nyrabia’s uncle, might have cautioned his nephew. Trained during Soviet times at the Russian State Institute of Cinema, Mr Mohammed chaired a panel discussion at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival entitled "Making films in a dictatorship". He was advised not to return to Syria and now lives in exile.

Before the start of the Syrian uprising, Omar Amiralay, the grand master of the Syrian documentary film and a friend of Mr Nyrabia, declared: “My cinema is no more than my expression of scorn at the despair and tyranny that governs life around me”. He died of a heart attack in February last year, just as the Arab spring was starting to gain steam. Had he lived, he might also have told Mr Nyrabia to be more careful.

Mr Amiralay, a former Marxist, had no illusions about the way President Bashar Assad was ruling Syria. Over many mint teas at the Havana café in central Damascus he would engage in comparative studies of all the surviving totalitarian regimes. Given the setting of those discussions, Cuba was often the topic. The consensus was that “Fidel was worse than Bashar”. One of the supporting arguments was that Mr Castro did not allow artists to travel freely, while Mr Assad did. That was then.